Month: February 2021

Rush Limbaugh, RIP

As we know, Rush Limbaugh died last week as a result of the cigars he held in his formerly nicotine-stained fingers. I leave it to you to decide what the “RIP” stands for.

The news of Rush’s death led to a LOT of negative comments on social media, which I shared in because of my current feelings about Limbaugh and the movement that he boosted. However my opinion isn’t that of a liberal who hated Limbaugh’s guts just because. I’m speaking as somebody who used to LIKE Limbaugh, and listened to his show (and to a lesser extent, Sean Hannity and Fox News) and while I may be more in agreement with liberals than I used to be, my antipathy toward Limbaugh is not because I always hated conservatism, but because I once agreed with it and hate what people like Rush turned it into. And even then, as with leftists saying “real socialism has never been tried” it’s a question of whether what I hate was a giant scam that I was persuaded had real merit or an agenda with real merit that was co-opted for a giant scam.

You have to understand, as much as some people think otherwise, politics is not eternal. I’ve already mentioned how liberals who find it hard to believe how Reagan destroyed their perfect world of regulations, upper tax brackets and unions don’t comprehend that at the time, a lot of people didn’t see that as a perfect world. I’ve heard it said, “if you remember the Seventies, you weren’t really there.” Well, I did remember that period, cause I was a kid, and unlike a lot of kids, I didn’t like drugs and didn’t like what they did to my peers. So I got to look at what was going on around me and I didn’t like it: Double digit inflation, double digit unemployment, an energy crisis, President Carter getting humiliated by the Iranians and even by a bunny rabbit. Reagan was my fuckin’ hero, frankly. If I’d been old enough, I would’ve voted for him. By the time I was old enough to vote, the Republican choice was George HW Bush. And as I said of him, he acted like Mr. Rogers when he should’ve acted like John Wayne, and he acted like John Wayne when he should have acted like Mr. Rogers.

So I was a conservative, or thought I was, and even in my conservatism I was still skeptical. I saw the whole political bag with a certain sense of humor that was lacking in most conservatives and certainly liberals. And of all the political observers, Rush Limbaugh was the least inclined to take the Beltway culture seriously. At the time, I considered that attitude a necessary corrective to politics as usual.

Rush was of course influential enough that when Newt Gingrich successfully won back Congress for the Republicans in 1994 – for the first time since 1954 – the Republicans invited Limbaugh to speak to the new Congressional delegates.

And among other things, he said, “You people in the press have got to understand something. This country is conservative, it has been for a long time. Get used to it. You tried to change it and you failed… (these reporters) were all trying to say in a roundabout way that I took a bunch of brainless people and converted them to mind-numbed robots. … there may be some talk show hosts who do that and I don’t think they’re the majority, I think the reason you’re sitting here tonight and liberals aren’t is that you understand the American people are intelligent. They are aware. They care.”

None of this is eternal. Even if both liberals and conservatives act like it is. Leftists assume that the government is built around the assertions of conservatives and reactionaries, when that was not always the case. The “conservatives” act as though the government is still built around the assertions of liberal Democrats and get-along-to-go-along Republicans, when that hasn’t been the case since at least Newt and Rush’s heyday. But both of those guys did perceive conservatism under attack, they did have a plan to get control of Washington, and they did execute it. That’s why there is still so much praise for Rush Limbaugh in conservative circles, because they remember when Rush was a serious influence on politics, hard as that may be to imagine today.

But then, it’s a bit hard to imagine today that Rudy Guiliani was once called “America’s Mayor” after 9/11. Which is for a similar reason.

Limbaugh is today less remembered for a constructive influence than a destructive one. For example, saying that Chelsea was the White House dog during the Clinton Administration. I’m sure a lot of people wouldn’t care. I mean, the whole point of being transgressive is that you don’t care about other people’s peer pressure and political correctness. But a lot of us who did listen to Rush and fell out of that habit did listen because we thought conservatism was supposed to be promoting something positive. Capitalism, opportunity, the chance to make a success of yourself, and challenging government mainly when it got in the way of all that. Over the years, it became obvious that even if there was a core there, that’s not what was being advertised. Years later, I wrote that the problem with “conservative” philosophy was that there really ISN’T a conservative philosophy and that to be conservative means to be conservative relative to something. And that was the problem with trying to convey conservatism as a positive philosophy, and I think why the Republican Congress never really tried to do that even back when they aspired to ideas: “Conservatives don’t get anything done because they don’t know what they want. And they don’t know what they want because they don’t know what they ARE.”

Over the years I’d also noticed that Rush was starting to somehow… lose it, as a radio host. His voice seemed off, and he rambled. It wasn’t for some time that he announced he was going deaf, and that was only after he had to respond to investigations that he was using unprescribed painkillers. (Which wasn’t his only incident with unprescribed drugs. In 2006, he returned from the Dominican Republic and customs officials confiscated a supply of Viagra that was not in his name. After the incident, Rush told his audience, ‘I had a great time in the Dominican Republic. Wish I could tell you about it.’)

But I also mentioned in my piece that if one wants to find out what happened to conservatism, or why the conservatism of Goldwater and Reagan turned into the Trump Fan Club, the mentality that led to Trump didn’t just come out of nowhere:
“Conor Friedersdorf had an excellent column in The Atlantic where he talked about how one of Rush Limbaugh’s own listeners (along with a columnist at RedState) called him on supporting Trump even when it was clear to many he would flip-flop on immigration, even when Rush said “I never took him seriously on this!”

“But that’s something I picked up on a while ago. Back when I was still conservative enough to listen to Limbaugh’s show, I remembered that right up to the last week of Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign against Rick Fazio, he was predicting that she would find some reason to back out. Or that she would end up losing. Of course, she didn’t. I distinctly remember the day after the 2006 midterm elections (when Democrats under President George W. Bush regained the House) when Limbaugh angrily confessed, “I feel liberated. … I no longer am gonna have to carry the water for people who I think don’t deserve having their water carried.” Heck, way back in 1992 (when Rush had a TV show) I remember a TV Guide cover with a blurb on an article, “Rush Limbaugh: I’m so-o-o happy Clinton won!”

In other words, whether he wanted to admit it or not, Rush was a political hack. I’d mentioned in another column that I was reminded of another incident where I deliberately tried to go over Fox News programming for a whole day to get my impressions of it, and it just so happened to be the day that Malik Hasan shot up Fort Hood, so I got to see that Fox News does have a real news operation, and the fact that there was real news to report put the midday events in contrast to the speculation of opinion pundits like Bill O’Reilly (now Tucker Carlson) in prime time, where Fox makes its real money and ratings. I said that that wasn’t the end of my watching Fox News, but I started watching it less and less, cause it felt like I’d seen the wires behind the magic trick. That’s pretty much how I felt about Rush saying that he was carrying the water for the Republican Party. Who was making the implication that he was? Wasn’t Rush the brave truth-teller against the RINO establishment? No. He was there to tell his audience to support the Party. Calling himself a water carrier was simply an admission of what should have been obvious by then.

I’ve been saying this many times, many ways, but in politics, you don’t succeed unless you give people something to fight FOR. And when Democrats didn’t figure that out, they lost to Republicans in 2004, and in 2016. Republicans won under Reagan and (sometimes) under the Bush family because they associated their party with positive traits that Americans wanted to be associated with. Apparently that’s just too hard now. Rush could have used his golden microphone to present constructive ideas for what Republicans could do, as opposed to just making fun of Democrat women and using “socialism” as a Devil word. I say this because I seem to recall in the old days that he would come up with ideas. But I guess that just wasn’t commercial. Rush Limbaugh, like Rudolph Giuliani and even Donald Trump, took his ‘tell-it-like-is’ reputation, and rather than use it to tell it like it is, became a cartoon character whose job was to amuse a limited demographic. And as with the demagogue who basically stole his act and took it to the White House, a lot of people took him as seriously as the Gospel (more seriously, in fact) when his ideas were becoming less and less serious.

Now that is okay if you see your role in the culture as being a jester or wrestling heel, but it’s not okay when you’re trying to lead the free world. Even in this country, you normally win elections by getting the most votes, and the flukes where that has not been the case have convinced the Republican Party that they can survive on the political campaign equivalent of AM radio niche programming, and that’s why they are where they are now. The first thing that right-wingers (Republican or Libertarian) have to learn is that the Left is going to call them a bunch of heartless ogres and witches whether they earn the reputation or not. Which is what makes it imperative NOT to earn it. Because if the uncommitted middle of the country can compare what woke cancel culture is telling them about you with what you actually do, and they see you are not the racist, sexist, whatever they are painting you as, you can prevail. But if you go out of your damn way to be associated with racists and other knuckle-draggers, then that’s on you. That’s how Joe Biden won Arizona, and Georgia, and the Electoral College by 74 Electoral votes, because even if Trump got more votes than he did in 2016, he got that many more people pissed at him who might not have been otherwise.

When all you have is negative partisanship, and you’re an effective minority, you’re setting yourself up to fail against a majority whose negative partisanship is earned by your actions. Of course, Biden also had positive partisanship, in that he seemed to be a real human being and professional government official, not a celebrity who made Snidely Whiplash look like Albert Schweitzer.

As National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty put it, “Many conservatives who have loathed the Donald Trump era will look back on Limbaugh’s success with regret, realizing that the talk-radio revolution was the giant leap from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.” I accidentally observed the same thing about Rush’s connection to Trump years before Rush’s death, as Trump was starting to take over the Republican Party, and concluded, “This attitude has been going on for quite some time, at least by the start of the second Obama term. The Republican Party has been Trump’s party for years. They were just waiting for him to show up.” And that’s because there isn’t a whole lot of space between Trump and Rush Limbaugh, except that Rush at least was coming off an intellectual tradition of William Buckley, Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater, and what he ended up doing was making something that didn’t even deserve to be called Zombie Reaganism. His fan club, who professed to disdain empty-headed celebrity millionaires, ended up becoming “mind-numbed robots” to a radio celebrity and a “reality” TV star, only one of whom could make a claim to being a self-made man.

Among the various other NeverTrump conservative autopsies of Limbaugh, on the 19th Andrew Sullivan said (on Substack): “As with Roger Ailes, it’s stupid to deny Limbaugh’s media genius. He created an entire world for his ditto heads to live and breathe in; he mastered an often hilarious gift for self-mockery disguised as self-flattery; and he had an unerring ability to expose and prick the self-righteous humbug of pious lefties. I will confess to laughing out loud many times at his blasphemy.

“And in the context of the once-smothering liberal monopoly of mass media of the 1980s, this insurrection was ballsy and overdue. But like the Gingrich phase of conservatism in the 1990s, which also broke a long-held liberal monopoly on the House of Representatives, it curdled over time. The tribal mockery was funny when allied with a coherent and counter-intuitive defense of conservative ideas and arguments. But as the years went by, and as conservatism remained calcified in a Reaganite zombie phase, the mockery began to replace the ideas completely, faute de mieux. What was originally an argument became merely an attitude, like the grin that slowly became all that was left of the Cheshire Cat. And with the emergence of a figure like Trump, who was a walking assault on conservative ideas and sensibility, the attitude became detached from any principle but tribalism, and based itself in exactly the kind of personal cultism Limbaugh innovated for himself.

“He was as personally kind and generous, we are told, as he was publicly shameless. And it’s important to see the man as a complicated whole. But what he did to conservatism was ultimately to facilitate its demise as a functional governing philosophy; and what he did to the country was intensify its cynicism and tribalism. Few did so much to popularize conservative values; and few did more, in the end, to discredit them.”

In fact, the real summary of Limbaugh’s spirit was already written over ten years before he died:

https://www.theonion.com/i-dont-even-want-to-be-alive-anymore-1819584611?utm_campaign=The+Onion&utm_content=1613585718&utm_medium=SocialMarketing&utm_source=facebook

REVIEW – Star Trek Discovery: Season 3

So: As I was saying, the main problem with Star Trek Discovery in its first two seasons is that they made the decision to have its main character be intimately involved in the history of at least one Original Series character despite the fact that she was never mentioned before, and therefore Discovery had to be placed in the Original Series period when the stories, the technology and the overall presentation went out of their way to not look anything like TOS, even compared to the pre-Kirk series Enterprise. Case in point: In the Enterprise story arc that occurred in the Mirror Universe, they at least had some reference to the sexy uniforms the cast wore in the original “Mirror, Mirror” episode. Whereas when Discovery entered the Mirror Universe, the Terran Empire uniforms were all Italian Fascist chic, and the overall look resembled the Lady Gaga video for “Alejandro.”

Now while Season 3 did end up going back to that, namely to work out the fact that Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) is now both a dimensional and time paradox, moving the series far into the future (far past even Star Trek Picard) is the best thing that ever happened to Discovery, because now they don’t even have to pretend to care about continuity. The old standards no longer apply. Which was very much the theme of this season.

First, Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) appeared a year before Discovery in the future timeline and had all that time to get used to the new environment and life with smuggler-with-a-heart of-gold Cleveland Booker (David Ajala), who taught her that the Federation had mostly collapsed after an event called “the Burn” in which most of the dilithium in the galaxy exploded, along with the ships that were using it. So even after Discovery shows up and she finds them, their main quest is to find what’s left of the Federation and help ‘get the band back together’, which I’m sure is going to be the continuing premise of Season 4.

In the midst of this, the crew finds the 32nd Century Starfleet Command, led by Admiral Vance (veteran actor Oded Fehr) and discovers not only that the refugee Romulans fully reunited with the Vulcans (changing the homeworld’s name to Ni’Var) but the Andorians after splitting off from the Feds ended up joining the Orions to create “the Emerald Chain”, which was set up as the main antagonist of the season. This was one of the better decisions they made, because the Orions always had the potential to be the capitalist/pirate/crime syndicate villains that Gene Roddenberry set up the Ferengi to be despite how embarrassing they were. Unfortunately while Chain leader Osyraa (Janet Kidder) and her lieutenant Zarek had both malice and style, they were apparently too ruthless to be left alive.

But the dilithium shortage created a situation where the Federation’s mode of civilization is now more the exception than the rule in a frontier-like environment, and Discovery’s spore drive not only allows it to bypass the limitations of other ships but makes it indispensable to the Federation and the quest to discover the source of the Burn. The Burn really was a great device to change the nature of the whole Star Trek setting. Unfortunately, the revelation that it boiled down to a child’s reaction to his mother’s death made the whole thing sink like a lead balloon.

Yes, it did give the actors involved some great emotional scenes, but the fact that this event was what led to the destruction of galactic civilization seems more than a bit anti-climax. Although the Su’Kal storyline did end up creating Discovery’s greatest special effect, in which the holo-program Su’Kal is living in made Saru appear as a human, so that for the first time Doug Jones got to play his character without makeup, and he actually looked WEIRDER.

And then they just sort of wrapped the whole thing up a bit too neatly. Osyraa, the main rival to the Federation government, was taken out, and in passing they said the Emerald Chain was breaking up. And with Saru helping take care of Su’Kal, Vance gave command of the Discovery to Burnham. And I’m not sure how I feel about that. Partially because it sort of confirms Burnham’s Mary-Sue status in Star Trek, but also because, contrary to the opinion that they’d been setting up this ascension from the beginning, you could make a good case, especially in Season 3, that the show was setting up the premise that maybe Michael WASN’T cut out to be a ship’s captain. Remember that the series basically started with an act of gross insubordination against the original Captain Georgiou. And in both Seasons 2 and 3, Saru experienced substantial growth as a personality and proved himself to be just as much captain material as Christopher Pike, whom Starfleet insisted on making the interim captain during Season 2 despite not having served on Discovery. Thus when the crew ended up in the 32nd Century, they unofficially decided to make Saru their full commander, a decision confirmed by the contemporary Starfleet. Meanwhile Burnham had spent all that time before the reunion traveling with Book as a rogue trader and getting used to the idea of a life outside the Starfleet command structure. And as Saru’s executive officer, she was obliged to direct an away team mission while Saru was at Starfleet, and while she did an excellent job, in a later episode Burnham went against Saru’s direct orders, and when Saru found out about this and consulted her friend Tilly, she reluctantly counseled him to go by the book rather than let Burnham off. And the interesting thing is that Saru finally decided to remove Burnham from the XO position and install Tilly there, because he saw that there is no point in being in command if you have no regard for the command structure, and Tilly realized that better than Burnham did. So in flipping around at the end and removing Tilly and Saru from Michael’s path, I suppose Discovery has confounded audience expectations, but not necessarily in a good way.

Another example of the “I’m not sure where they’re going with this” is Discovery‘s continued attempts at diversity. They had previously introduced Dr. Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp) and his husband Dr. Hugh Culber (Wilson Cruz) only to kill Culber in Season 1. They came up with an ingenious method (using Stamets’ connection to the spore network) to resurrect Culber in Season 2, but after that Culber broke off the relationship since he no longer felt like he was in love with Stamets – he had the memory of their relationship, but not the experience of it. I thought this was an interesting angle to take with the character – if you die, is there a soul outside the body that just comes back if the body is restored, or is the person a purely material thing, and therefore Hugh is really not the same individual? This is a question that poses potentially disturbing answers (whether you’re an atheist or believer) and the show didn’t really get into it after Hugh volunteered to go with Paul into the future. They only touched on it a couple times this season, namely near the end when Hugh volunteered to go down to Su’Kal’s planet to help bring him out of his isolation. The relationship also ties into the new character introduced in Season 3, the 32nd Century Terran prodigy Adira Tal (Blu del Barrio), who was promoted as the first non-binary character in Star Trek. From a SF standpoint, Adira is more interesting in being a Human who is somehow able to host a Trill (apparently they improved the transplant technology after all those years) and a Trill who has a past life that is still separate and conscious – her boyfriend Gray (Ian Alexander) who had begged Adira to take the symbiont when he was dying. The two characters seem to be something of a primer for the audience in how to deal with trans people in their lives – especially since Adira is first introduced to Burnham as female, but then is put in Stamets’ engineering team and ends up confessing that they prefer to be addressed as “they.” (Apparently this paralleled del Barrio’s own decision to come out in real life.) The fact that Adira’s main connection to the crew ends up being the cis gay couple of Stamets and Culber also seemed deliberate. And Gray Tal’s continued individual existence is finally revealed when both Hugh and Adira end up on Su’Kal’s planet and Hugh can finally see Gray through the holo-program. And the fact that Gray no longer has a physical presence once the program is terminated leads Hugh to promise Gray that he will help find a way that he can be “seen” – another message to the audience that seems deliberate. Now, these moments are part of the great emotional scenes I referred to earlier, but they’re not exactly being subtle with the meta-text. Which just gets to how I have the same problem with Discovery that I have with Star Trek: Picard – I like the characters, and I really like the actors, but the writing falls down.

The main reason I bring most of this up is that the new parental relationship Paul and Hugh have to Adira/Gray led to an actual bit of tension between protagonists, when Burnham rescued Stamets from the Emerald Chain and he told her they had to get Culber and Saru off Su’Kal’s planet, and Burnham told her that would lead the chain to a huge dilithium source that was also the origin of the Burn. When she told Stamets that Adira had gone to the planet to give the two men radiation drugs to keep them alive, Stamets completely lost it, and Burnham had to subdue him then launch him in a pod towards Starfleet Command Center so that Osyraa couldn’t use the Discovery to reach Su’Kal’s planet. And while that case of Burnham’s ruthless on-the-fly decision making was actually the right move (and probably contributed to Vance’s decision to give her the ship), they’re making it pretty clear that Stamets hasn’t forgiven Burnham for it, and that may cause her problems going forward.

That and the rebuilding-the-Federation premise is what gives me hope for Season 4, but I’m still ambivalent. I’d said in my review of Season 1, “Discovery at least takes chances, and when it goes wrong, it isn’t because they failed in execution, it’s because they went forthrightly in a certain direction that just turned out to be the wrong one.” This show does take chances, but that doesn’t mean they always work out. This is part of why the show attracts so much flak, and given that it’s hardly the only Star Trek show to have bad moments and false steps, it’s hard to say how much of the hate is a politically incorrect fandom and how much is the ambivalent product.

It doesn’t help that the show’s semi-official nickname seems to be “DISCO.” Which might not even be the worst choice. If you were to apply the three-letter abbreviation format that these other shows have, so that the original series is “TOS”, Voyager is “VOY” and Enterprise is “ENT”, that would make Discovery “DIS.” Or “STD.”

Even so, Season 3 is certainly the best Discovery so far, again because the premise of kicking the cast out of standard Trek’s timeline eliminates the conflict they created for themselves in being so much unlike other Trek material. I’ve seen at least one YouTube video making a detailed case that the “Temporal Wars” referred to in both this series and Enterprise demonstrate that both series are in their own timeline that, like JJ Abrams’ Trek, ultimately has nothing to do with the Prime universe. This does not seem to be the canon position, but it helps me feel better about Discovery. At least with Season 3, there’s a better chance the show will be appreciated on its own terms.

REVIEW: Star Trek Discovery – Season Two

Star Trek: Discovery came back for Season Three, which just ended. But before dealing with that, I realized I never did a review of Season Two. Which is relevant because it not only sets up Season Three, but also an even more explicitly retro-Trek project with pre-logical Spock, Captain Pike and “Number One” in the soon-to-be-produced series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. The fact that Strange New Worlds is a more logical version of retro-Trek than Discovery is one of the main lessons I took from watching Discovery Season 2.

Discovery Season 2 begins with the cliffhanger scene from the end of Season 1, where the ship came face-to-face with the USS Enterprise under Captain Pike. At this point, of course, Spock is already an officer on that ship, and Discovery established that Commander Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) is Spock’s adoptive sister. The first few episodes of Season 2 tease dramatic reunions – Burnham with Spock, Burnham with Tyler, the Discovery with the Enterprise and Stamets with Culber – that do not immediately occur. As it turns out, the Enterprise’s Captain Pike is assigned to the Discovery while his ship is undergoing repairs and Discovery is still waiting for an official captain assignment, and Pike has to tell Burnham that Spock has gone missing. This sets off an investigation by Burnham that reveals her own childhood trauma and rift with Spock, not to mention the old Trek plot device of time travel.

And as we know, time travel becomes the primary focus of the season arc, as Pike’s mission ends up working backwards to learn why a “Red Angel” is appearing at pivotal events.

As good as individual elements of the Season 2 storyline were, the whole thing just brought the problems demonstrated by Discovery Season 1 to a head. I had already mentioned one of them. Rather than create new Vulcan characters as producers did with Enterprise, producers linked Burnham’s background to none other than Sarek and Spock, which meant that comparisons with the original material were inevitable, especially in Season 2 as they made Captain Pike a central character while somehow de-emphasizing Spock.

Going back to the old characters actually worked for the Abrams movies, because the cast was able to make characters that stood on their own as people in a parallel universe but were clearly intended to evoke the concepts of the originals. This was especially true with Chris Pine, who pulled off the amazing trick of creating a character who is quintessentially James T. Kirk without being a bad William Shatner impression. Because let’s face it, no one can do a bad William Shatner impression like Bill Shatner.

The producers of Discovery weren’t as lucky. I already said I didn’t find James Frain convincing as Sarek, even though I think he’s a good actor. However this season, I was pretty impressed by Mia Kershner as his wife Amanda. The major find of this season, though, was Anson Mount as Christopher Pike. That character had really appeared only in the pilot episode “The Cage”, played by Jeffrey Hunter. (They presented a heavily made up Sean Kenney to play the maimed Pike in ‘The Menagerie’, the flashback episode made out of The Cage, to help cover the fact that Hunter refused to reprise the role after deciding not to continue after the pilot.) I liked Hunter’s version of the character. He seemed to have an edge. In the scene where he’s talking to the ship’s doctor, one gets the impression he’s a nearly burned-out military vet who has seen some shit. And in the scenes where the Talosians are trying to tempt him, he seems like he would be just as happy to retire to a ranch and raise horses.

Like most of the Discovery actors playing Original Series people, Anson Mount doesn’t really come across like the original actor, other than being the leading-man type. But in this case it works. Mount is sort of like Chris Evans in the Captain America movies: He doesn’t even try to play anything other than the True-Blue Hero, and he doesn’t need to, cause he’s so good at it. And the fact that he is obliged to see his horrible future but chooses to suffer it anyway in order to save the timeline gives Pike a sort of tragic perspective that Hunter’s character didn’t have.

As for Spock, Ethan Peck is a good actor and a pleasant presence, but he is just as much not-Leonard Nimoy as Mount is not-Jeffrey Hunter, and in this case it doesn’t work as well, because Nimoy had so much more time to put his stamp on the character, and Peck doesn’t embody Spock nearly as well as Zachary Quinto. I’m also not quite sure why, but Discovery Season 2 made the decision to make Spock more of a device than a pivotal figure, as opposed to Pike or Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) or even Tyler. It doesn’t help that he’s very not “Spock-like” in this story arc, even if there is a reason for that.

This contrast between what we have now and what the characters were is of course going to be a factor when Strange New Worlds comes out, but there is at least an attempt to emulate old-school Trek with the Enterprise crew (and uniforms) that deliberately sets them apart from the design of Discovery, and that only serves to confirm the fundamental dilemma of calling this a Star Trek show. It’s not really much of a dilemma if you are one of those old-school, politically incorrect types that never did like Discovery, but it’s a problem if you actually do like it.

And a lot of what it comes down to is this:

You couldn’t have had a character like Michael Burnham as a star character in the time of original Trek. And that’s not because the producers were lacking for “diversity” or political correctness: The progressive tone of the original series is overstated, but it was real. The pilot episode did have Majel Barrett as the executive officer. The show did give us Uhuru and Sulu. The original series cast several non-white actors, including the great William Marshall as Dr. Richard Daystrom, one of the pivotal figures in Federation science. And of course, the breakout star was a not-leading-man casting, Jewish actor playing a half-human alien.

The problem rather, was that “political correctness” worked the other way back then, and the network executives fought Gene Roddenberry and his crew over a lot of their barrier-breaking ideas. They rejected the pilot episode character (Number One) played by Barrett and barely embraced Spock, so that Barrett got demoted to playing Dr. McCoy’s nurse and Spock ended up being both Science Officer and XO. I have no doubt that Roddenberry, DC Fontana or one of the other writers could have created a character like Burnham, but given what Nichelle Nichols has described in the stress of playing Uhuru, who was only a support character, it’s pretty much impossible that networks in that time would have cast a black woman as the star of an action show.

Then there’s the fact that unlike Enterprise, Discovery never even tried to establish internal continuity with pre-Kirk Trek, with sick bay tech more advanced than Dr. McCoy’s, and a ‘spore drive’ that was probably not imaginable in the ’60s. To say nothing of the fact that they changed the Klingon makeup yet again.

Now, maybe with modern attitudes we can show the characters that original Trek clearly indicated could exist elsewhere in the Federation (just as we can now create aliens like Saru now that Trek has an effects budget above four digits), but we’re still left with the point that for an unfortunate real-world reason, Michael Burnham could not have been a pivotal figure in the history of the Enterprise and the Federation before Kirk, and therefore in order to preserve the Federation from Control (and to preserve what’s left of continuity), the best way Tyler, Spock and Pike can honor her life is to pretend she never existed and never speak of her again.

The main attraction of Discovery – ‘what if we could do old-school Trek, but with diverse characters and addressing situations we couldn’t have mentioned in the 1960s?’ – was also the show’s main weakness, because there’s a whole bunch of reasons why the Original Series didn’t have these elements, and pretending that you can take a modern premise and put it in a ‘historical’ setting doesn’t work, for the same reason it wouldn’t work if you did a remake of The Scarlet Pimpernel scripted by David Mamet and directed by Quentin Tarantino. (Though I would pay good money to watch the result.)

It basically goes back to the point I’d made in my other two reviews: In going back to established material, you are inevitably dealing with continuity issues, and it defeats the purpose of saying that Discovery is in the Original Series period when it goes out of its way to NOT feel like it. Eventually the show painted itself into a corner where the only way to resolve the setting issue was to remove Discovery from the timeline altogether – which is just what they did.